Empirical exploration of critical challenges of requirements implementation in global software development

Abstract

Requirements collection is difficult and a critical phase of software development life cycle, in particular in a global software development (GSD) environment. In GSD, clients and vendors are physically separated such that there exist challenges such as lack of face‐to‐face communication, language differences, culture variation, and time zone differences. The objective of current research is to identify critical challenges of requirement engineering in GSD. There is no work done yet to empirically analyze all possible challenges via questionnaire survey from software industries. This research paper empirically investigates and analyze the identified challenges from systematic literature review (SLR) based on a questionnaire survey. For this purpose, 50 respondents from different countries are organized. From this research, 13 challenges during requirements implementation in the context of GSD have been identified previously via SLR. These challenges were then evaluated using an empirical approach of questionnaire survey. The results from respondents were analyzed based on type of respondents, level of experience of respondents, and from client–vendor perspective. Finally, the challenges were prioritized based on its frequency of occurrences from the SLR and the questionnaire survey. The relationships between the challenges and the survey results were evaluated using the Spearman's correlation coefficient. The results produced a 0.835 Spearman's correlation coefficient at significance level ρ = 0.000, which showed a strong positive correlation between the outcome of SLR and survey with no significant difference. The implication of this research work lies in both fundamental and practical perspective. The prioritized set of challenges was provided based on SLR, and questionnaire survey acts as a knowledge base for both researchers and industrial practitioners. This work will help researchers to identify challenges in GSD projects or other software engineering areas.

Exploratory study of existing research on software requirements prioritization: A systematic literature review

“…Instructions of other authors are also followed who also applied SLR in same manner as presented in this paper. 1,2,17 The phases begin with formulating the research questions, followed by planning the search strategies, examining and measuring the quality assessment criteria, and finally synthesizing the data.…”

“…It is the degree of agreement among independent observers that rates, codes, or assesses the same phenomenon. 1,2,17 The prearranged selection procedure had two portions: In phase 01, papers were selected on the basis of reading title and abstract of papers, and in phase 02, full papers were read from start to end. Inter-rater reliability test was done in order to decrease the researcher's bias where the secondary reviewer selected five publications randomly from the list of "total results found" and did the initial and final selection processes.…”

“…8 Requirements prioritization (RP) focuses on ranking all requirements and may originate from the stakeholder's point of view (URs) based on business need (BRs), time and cost (PRs) of the project, or from the system's point of view (FRs and NFRs). Following, RP is carried out in three stages: (1) planning stage in which the requirements are structured and prepared for prioritization, (2) implementation stage in which the actual prioritization takes place, and (3) documentation stage in which the results of from requirements prioritization are documented and presented.…”